Catholic Issues "Fatwa" For Dan Brown's Head

Here's a theorem - call it Cernig's theory of religious extremism. It says if you combine evangelistic teaching of any religion with a general feeling of disenfranchisement, it will produce enough militant nutters to fuel a terror movement somewhere. Cases in point - the IRA, al Qaeda, U.S. anti-abortionist extremists, vegan environmentalist bombers, pagan "Norse" white supremacists. Usually, these angry people of hardline faith couch their violence in terms of their idiotic religious rivalries even when disenfranchisement or poverty are the real breeding ground for their extremism.

Here's another, from India, proving that Christianity can still not say it has become purely a religion of peace.

New Delhi (ENI). Some Indian Christians are so incensed with the fictional blockbuster "The Da Vinci Code" they want the government to ban it and one Roman Catholic has offered a bounty of US$25 000 on the head of author Dan Brown, leaving other members of the faithful embarrassed by the reaction.

Nicolas Almeida, a Catholic and former Mumbai municipal councillor, offered a reward of 1.1 million rupees ($25 000) for the head of author Brown, leading a Catholic journalist to compare Almeida to the Taliban.

That's one journalist, who I suspect works for Ecumenical News International, the body that produced the report. Others were less charitably Christian, while managing somehow to use freedom of religion as an argument against freedom of speech (a tactic familiar from the Christian Right in America):

Archbishop Stanislaus Fernandes, secretary general of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, said the fictional work "belittles what is at the heart of Christian faith and cherished in Christian life", in a statement objecting to the release of the movie.

"Every individual has a right to his religious beliefs and to enjoy the respect to them from the followers of other religions," said the bishops' conference in an 11 May statement.

It's thinking like that which has caused one small Indian state, the small and predominantly Christian state of Nagaland, to ban the movie already.

Question: if God is so great and powerful, why do his followers (of any religion) so often ascribe to him the personality and motives of a schoolyard bully? Is it because they ascribe their own personalities and motives, only writ far larger, I wonder?